Technical Field
The present invention relates to an ultrasonic measurement apparatus, an ultrasonic image apparatus, and an ultrasonic measurement method.
Related Art
A known feature in an ultrasonic measurement apparatus is one where a component of a transmitted fundamental frequency is extracted from an ultrasonic echo for ultrasonic waves of the fundamental frequency, and the extracted component is subjected to adaptive beamforming. Adaptive beamforming is able to maximize the sensitivity of received waves coming from a desired direction, or to minimize the sensitivity of unneeded waves coming from a direction other than a desired direction, and therefore has been put to practical use in, for example, radar systems and submarine sonar systems.
As one example of adaptive beamforming, Japanese laid-open patent publication 2012-170826 discloses an ultrasonic beamforming method for splitting an inputted ultrasonic signal into a plurality of regions over an observation space, calculating a weighting value by region, calculating a pixel weighting value for each pixel, and calculating a beamforming value.